


eye of the beholder

by attice



Category: Captain America (2011), Marvel (Movies)
Genre: M/M
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2012-09-18
Updated: 2012-09-18
Packaged: 2017-11-14 13:37:26
Rating: Explicit
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 2,346
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/515760
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/attice/pseuds/attice
Summary: <blockquote class="userstuff">
              <p>Bucky doesn’t like Steve’s drawings. Not the way everyone else does, at least.</p>
            </blockquote>





	eye of the beholder

**Author's Note:**

  * Translation into 中文 available: [旁觀者之眼](https://archiveofourown.org/works/1882821) by [Cyaegha](https://archiveofourown.org/users/Cyaegha/pseuds/Cyaegha)



Bucky doesn’t like Steve’s drawings. Not the way everyone else does, at least. He flips through Steve’s sketchbooks sometimes, when the moon glimmers in a humid sky and every window in Brooklyn is hanging open like the tongues of dogs in summer and the television set’s broken again, no channels no  _nothing,_ and the radio’s been loaned out and there’s nothing for the two of them to do but lie on the couch and the chair and breathe.

All of Steve’s sketchpads are out on the table. He would have put them away, but Bucky came over on short notice and it’s too late, anyway.

“These for your class?” Bucky asks, and Steve nods, because it’s too hot to do much else.

He stares at the cracks in the ceiling until his eyes dry out and he has to blink, and then he turns to look at Bucky. He's sitting at the chair in front of the desk—backwards, so his chin is balanced on the backrest—and looking at his drawings.  _Sketches,_ Steve tells himself, like he tells everyone else when they say  _Christ, Rogers, you’re a fucking Picasso or something,_ and he doesn’t bother to remind them that Picasso wasn’t exactly a—

Bucky stays silent.

“Like them?” Steve asks, finally.

“That’s the corner store,” Bucky says—“And that’s the library, that’s—that’s the butcher.” He raises an eyebrow. “You spent a lot of time on these.”

“Yeah.” Steve sits up—no, pulls himself up, so he can balance his head on his elbow.  _Christ, Rogers, you’re a fucking Pi—_

“That’s me,” Bucky says slowly.

Steve swallows.

“Yeah,” he says. “I—”

“That’s me in uniform,” Bucky says.

Steve sits up, this time for real, and then he lifts, slightly, so he can see what Bucky’s looking at. It’s himself—or close to himself, at least, rough sketches, maybe angry, maybe resentful; Steve remembers the day Bucky showed him that uniform and he remembers  _let’s go to the bar, get a drink, on me, come on, Steve,_ and the girls, so many of them, and—

“Yeah,” Steve says again. “Jesus, Buck, it’s getting—”

Bucky looks over at him, head turning over the chair’s back, and grins—slow and lazy, the kind of grin that’s reserved for Steve when Bucky thinks something’s goddamn funny. He’d never use that on a girl. He’d use it on his dad, sometimes—that’s where he got the black eyes, Steve knew—and he’d use it on teachers when they failed him and bullies before he got the shit beaten out of him.

“You got any dirty pictures?” Bucky asks.

Steve’s cheeks burn red and his mouth opens with nothing to say—dirty pictures,  _dirty pictures,_ and suddenly all he can think of are the scraps of paper that are most certainly not in the sketchbooks he takes to school _—_ “Dirty—? I—not... not of—what do you—”

“Only kidding,” Bucky says, but the grin doesn’t match the look in his eyes. His eyes fall back to the drawings. “Don’t you get to see naked girls?” He waggles his eyebrows at Steve. “For art?”

Steve tries to breathe. “No,” he says. “There’s—I signed up for the still life course this summer.”

Bucky sighs dramatically. “Steve Rogers, passing up the opportunity to get to draw dames in the nude. And you wonder why they won’t let you into the army. I’ll tell you why.” He taps his head. “No brains.”

Steve rolls his eyes and sinks back down onto the sofa cushions.

They’ve done this before—sit, talk, try to sleep, wait for a slightly cooler morning to come around. The story is always the same—they’ll talk until it’s too hot to go on, Bucky’ll get bored, Bucky’ll find a bottle, Bucky’ll get drunk and do something stupid and go to sleep on a wooden chair. Steve’s not strong enough to move him to a bed, move him to a couch, move him anywhere, so Bucky’ll wake up with a kink in his neck and Steve will make him some coffee and they’ll go on with their lives

( _until the next time steve gets beat up in an alley)_

until the next time a hot Brooklyn moon rolls around.

“Met a new girl,” Bucky says, after a while.

“Yeah?” Steve’s too tired to feign interest. Bucky gets new girls all the time. He knows Bucky’s type—tall, brunette, red lipstick, laugh like tinkling bells, good for a few easy fucks, doesn’t mind cheap dinners and cigarette smoke. The breakup is inevitable, just like the next girl to say  _yes_ to Bucky at the bar, the next girl to follow him into the bed that Steve’s spent so much of his childhood sleeping i—

“I think she’s the one,” Bucky says, and Steve’s eyebrows furrow until he looks up and sees that Bucky’s grinning.

“Honestly, though,” Bucky says. “She’s—she’s decent.”

“That’s great, Bucky.”  _Christ, Rogers, you’re a fucki—_

Something’s wrong. Something’s—on edge, here, something’s slipping, something’s not right. Bucky looks at Steve and Steve looks at Bucky, and he knows that the smile on Bucky’s face is stale.

“You should get yourself a girl, Steve,” Bucky says. “They’d like you. Small, so you can’t push them around—you’re  _sweet_ , you like art, they’d all talk about how goddamn  _cute_ you a—”

“Shut up.”

They hang like that for a while, until Bucky gets up and Steve thinks that he’s going to leave now—go meet up with the girl who’ll let him buy her a few drinks, maybe more, get her tipsy and then take her home, Jesus  _Christ,_ it’s not fair and Steve can’t quite put his finger on why—until Bucky comes back in with a bottle of moonshine and collapses beside Steve on the couch.

Bucky drinks slowly and steadily, and Steve drinks in violent swigs that make his head spin. It’s not like he could drink otherwise—liquor has always been too much for him, even the watered-down hooch Bucky used to steal when they were fifteen and black-and-blue on the elementary school playground— _I dare you,_ Bucky’d said, and Steve was pretty sure he had a cracked rib, what the hell, so he did, and—

Bucky passes the bottle back to Steve, and Steve drinks from it without wiping the top off. Bucky watches him, and Steve pretends that Bucky’s staring at his lips as he does it.

“That was me in my uniform,” Bucky says slowly—“Thought you were in a still life class.”

Steve gives it back and shrugs.

 _Christ_ —

Steve pretends that he can’t feel Bucky’s breath on his cheek.

“It's fucking  _hot,”_ Bucky murmurs, and reaches down to pull his shirt over his head.

Steve can see Bucky’s dog tags catching dull yellow glows from the dim lamplight as Bucky chucks his shirt onto the coffee table. Their shoes and socks are already strewn over the rug, sweated off and discarded like fruits fallen from a tree, mixing with stubs of pencils and cigarettes that Steve hasn’t bothered to pick up. The city thumps outside, glowing lights all flickering in summer heat, and Bucky’s sweat gleams on his skin.

“She’s a nice girl,” Bucky says suddenly, like he’s continuing a story. “But she doesn’t—doesn’t know how to kiss.”

“Kiss one too many and you’re going to catch something,” Steve mutters. Bucky doesn’t laugh, but there’s a strange expression in his eyes, and Steve doesn’t have to pretend that Bucky’s staring at his lips anymore.

“Still no dirty pictures?” Bucky asks. He sets the bottle down.

Steve remembers this conversation—at first, a little, and then, all of it. When they were kids, Bucky kissed a girl for the first time in third grade. Sally Louise, and he'd been so proud that he hadn't shut up about it for weeks. When they were kids, Bucky kissed a girl with tongue for the first time in sixth grade, and Steve didn’t even look up from his comic book when he told Bucky that he was going to catch catch a disease and die.

 _She can’t kiss,_ Bucky’d laughed, tossing one of his dad’s skin rags onto the floor beside Steve.  _Hey, you seen this?_

 _Dead in a week,_ Steve had promised, ignoring the way Bucky was biting his lip and focusing on Superman’s predictably heroic efforts to save poor Lois.  _Put that away before your dad finds out that—_

“Let me fuck you," Bucky murmurs, breath coming heavy in Steve's ear.   
  
Does Steve like it when Bucky fucks him? The answer is yes and no. He likes it when Bucky rests one hand in the small of his back as he fingers him, one finger up to the first knuckle, and then the second,likes the way that Bucky presses his mouth into his neck when Steve gasps, likes the way Bucky's hands come around to grip him around either side of his hips when he lowers him onto his dick. He likes the way Bucky's breath comes a little rough, a little short, as Steve rolls and shudders on top of him. He likes the way Bucky mouths Steve's name and forgets the words that are coming out of his mouth, which are always variations of  _Steve_ and  _fuck_ and  _oh God_ and sometimes phrases,  _God, you're perfect_ and  _just like that,_ until Steve's all the way down and Bucky's moaning underneath him, fingers scrabbling in the wet couch cushions.  
  
Steve braces his hands on the backrest of the couch and sinks against Bucky's cock.  
  
Bucky's not as drunk as he lets on. Sometimes it bothers Steve that Bucky has to pretend to get blasted out of his mind every time he wants to fuck—it's a ritual, the story is always the same, the way Bucky watches Steve's body, arms sprawled out over the couch like a cat in the sunshine, the way Bucky averts his eyes every time Steve tries to meet them. The story is always the same—they'll talk until it's too hot to go on, Bucky'll get bored, Bucky'll find a bottle, Bucky'll get drunk and do something stupid and go to sleep on a wooden chair.  
  
Is Steve something stupid? In Brooklyn, yes. In this apartment, no. If Bucky was as drunk as he wants Steve to think, he'd have come now—rooted inside Steve, so deep Steve can almost taste him, thrusting into Steve in small, shallow movements—hell, maybe Steve is something stupid, but if he is, Bucky is something even more stupid, gasping his name and forgetting to slur his words as Steve rolls his hips and starts fisting his own cock.  
  
Steve Rogers is, for the most part, a good man. He is small and he likes to draw and doesn’t like bullies; his best friend is Bucky Barnes, and Bucky knows everything about him except for a few things that maybe even Steve doesn’t know for sure. They live in Brooklyn, and in the winter it is gray and in the summer it is also gray, and Steve’s sometimes thought about Bucky in ways that ran deeper than fucking each other when they have nothing better to do and who knows what Bucky thinks about?  
  
 _(Girls)_  
  
Steve touches himself and kisses Bucky while he does it. He can taste himself, and  
  
 _(She’s a nice girl)_  
  
what they’ve been drinking. Bucky starts moving inside of him again, harder, and Steve can't quite muffle the sounds that come out of his mouth as Bucky slams up into him once, twice, again— _Jesus, Barnes, fuck,_ and maybe he's saying it or maybe he's just thinking it, Steve isn't quite sure. He tries to focus on Bucky's face—tries to figure out what Bucky's thinking, if he's thinking anything, if he's thinking about his best friend sitting in his lap and riding his cock or if he's thinking about the girl he's supposed to meet tomorrow night. Steve wonders if this is all it's ever going to be.  
  
( _Christ, Rogers.)_  
  
Bucky's breath comes out in pieces and Steve knows that he's close. He guides Bucky's hands to the swell of his ass—well, really, maybe not much of a swell, Jesus—and lets Bucky press him down, pull him up, slip another finger against Steve's stretched hole and rub him through the final few strokes. Their eyes lock for a second and Steve remembers that usually pulls off before Bucky comes, but tonight is different, he wants Bucky to  _remember_ tonight, so he clenches hard and pushes down, feeling that rough, rough slide, and Bucky comes inside of him, wet and warm and sticky, sliding down his legs. 

Steve jerks himself off with Bucky softening inside of him, and then he comes over Bucky's stomach.  
  
Bucky's eyes are blue like morning mist and street smoke and the end of a sunset, and Steve doesn't slide off of his lap even though they're both done, finished, even though now it's Bucky's turn to pretend to be drunk and fall asleep somewhere stupid to prove that he is. They stay like that, breathing hard, covered each other's come, and Bucky opens his mouth to speak, and—  
  
"Don't," Steve says breathlessly—"Just—not now. Please."  
  
Bucky goes home, after that. Steve's ruined something—Steve's changed something. He watches Bucky go into his bathroom, listens to the water turn on, off, watches Bucky come out of his bathroom, pull his shirt off the rug and put it on, slide his legs through his pants, look for his belt, wind his belt through the loops, stick his shoes on his feet and ball his socks up in his pockets. Steve pulls his pants back on. He can feel Bucky's come still inside of him. Does he like it? The answer is yes and n—

He watches Bucky pause at the door and open his mouth again, like he's going to say something. Like he's going to acknowledge this, acknowledge Steve for the first time in his goddamn—

"Night," he says.   
  
Steve nods. It’s too hot to do much else.

 

 

 

 


End file.
